Chapter VIII: Part 8

There is not yet definite agreement by other psychologists with Skinner’s contention that recall rather than recognition is the desired method. Neither is it sure that the negative reinforcement of a number of incorrect choices may result in remembering wrong answers. And of course the division between rote learning and creativity is an important consideration. The answers may well lie in the computer, which when properly programmed is about the most logical device we have available to us. Thus the machine may determine the best teaching methods and then use them to teach us. Regardless of these as yet unanswered questions, however, the future of the teaching machine seems to be assured. One authority has predicted that it will be a $100 million market by 1965.

An intriguing use of computer techniques in teaching is being investigated by Corrigan Communications, which scores students answering questions on telecourses. This work is being done with a course in medicine, and with the rapid growth of educational television the implications of combining it and teaching machine techniques are of great importance.

Classroom teaching is not the only educational application for the teaching machine. A computer-controlled library is an interesting thought, with the patron requesting information from a central computer and having it presented instantaneously on a viewing screen in front of him. Such a system could conceivably have access to a national library hookup, constantly updated with new material. Such a service would also be available for use during school study hall, or by the teacher during class.

Visitors to the World’s Fair in Seattle previewed the computerized information center of the future. Called Library 21, it is considered a prototype of the next century’s core libraries which will be linked to smaller branches by communications networks. Many computers were displayed, tied in with teaching machines, language laboratories, and information from the Great Books, tailored to the individual questioner’s sex, personality, and mental level. Also shown was a photo process that reduces a 400-page book to the size of a postage stamp for storage.

With this kind of progress, we can in the foreseeable future request and receive up-to-date information of any kind of human knowledge anywhere—in language we can understand. Another computer application sure to come is that of handling correspondence courses. The teaching of extension courses in the home, through television and some sort of response link, has been mentioned, and it is not impossible that the school as a physical plant may one day no longer be necessary.

_International Business Machines Corp._

This system supplies legal information in minutes, with insertion of
punched-card query (top). Using inquiry words, computer prints
citations of statutes (middle); then, on request, full text (below).
]

Since the computer itself does not “teach,” but merely acts as a go-between for the man who prepared the lesson or program and the student who learns, it would seem that some of our teachers may become programmers. The System Development Corporation has broken the teaching machine program into three phases: experimenting with the effects of many variables on teaching machine effectiveness, developing a simplified teaching machine, and finally, analyzing the educational system to find where and how the machine fits. Research is still in the first phase, that of experiment. But it is known that some programs produced so far show better results than conventional teaching methods, and also that teaching machines can teach any subject involving factual information. Thus it is evident they will be useful in schools and also in industry and military training programs.

_Language_

If man is to use the computer to teach himself, he must be able to converse with it. In the early days of computers it was said with a good deal of justification that the machine was not only stupid but decidedly insular as well. In other words, man spoke to it in its own language or not at all. A host of different languages, or “compilers” as they are often called, were constructed and their originators beat the drums for them. With tongues like ALGY, ALGOL, COBOL, FACT, FLOWMATIC, FORTRAN, INTERCOM, IT, JOVIAL, LOGLAN, MAD, PICE, and PROLAN, to name a few, the computer has become a tower of Babel, and a programmer’s talents must include linguistics.

One language called ALGOL, for Algorithmic Oriented Language, had pretty smooth sailing, since it consists of algebraic and arithmetic notation. Out of the welter of business languages a compromise Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL, evolved. What COBOL does for programming computer problems is best shown by comparing it with instructions once given the machine. The sample below is typical of early machine language:

SUBTRACT QUANTITY-SOLD FROM BALANCE-ON-HAND. IF BALANCE-ON-HAND IS NOT
LESS THAN REORDER-LEVEL THEN GO TO BALANCE-OK ELSE COMPUTE
QUANTITY-TO-BUY = TOTAL-SALES-3-MOS/3.
]

Recommended by a task force for the Department of Defense, industry, and other branches of the government, COBOL nevertheless has had a tough fight for acceptance, and there is still argument and confusion on the language scene. New tongues continue to proliferate, some given birth by ALGOL and COBOL themselves. Examples of this generation are GECOM, BALGOL, and TABSOL. One worthy attempt at a sort of machine Esperanto is called a pun-inviting UNCOL, for Universal Computer-Oriented Language and seems to be a try for the computer’s vote. One harried machine-language user has suggested formation of an “ALGOLICS Anonymous” group for others of his ilk, while another partisan accuses his colleagues in Arizona of creating a new language while “maddened by the scent of saguaro blossoms.”

It was recently stated that perhaps by the time a decision is ultimately reached as to which will be the general language, there will be no need of it because by then the computer will have learned to read and write, and perhaps to listen and to speak as well. Recent developments bear out the contention.

Although it has used intermediate techniques, the computer has proved it can do a lot with our language in some of the tasks it has been given. Among these is the preparation of a Bible concordance, listing principal words, frequency of appearance, and where they are found. The computer tackled the same job on the poems of Matthew Arnold. For this chore, Professor Stephen Maxfield Parrish of Cornell worked with three colleagues and two technicians to program an IBM 704 data-processing system. In addition to compiling the list of more than 10,000 words used most often by Arnold, the computer arranged them alphabetically and also compiled an appendix listing the number of times each word appeared. To complete the job, the computer itself printed the 965-page volume. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the works of St. Thomas Aquinas have also been turned over to the computer for preparation of analytical indexes and concordances.

At Columbia University, graduate student James McDonough gave an IBM 650 the job of sleuthing the author of _The Iliad_ and _The Odyssey_. Since the computer can detect metric-pattern differences otherwise practically undiscoverable, McDonough felt that the machine could prove if Homer had written both poems, or if he had help on either. Thus far he is sure the entire _Iliad_ is the work of one man, after computer analysis of its 112,000 words. The project is part of his doctoral thesis. A recent article in a technical journal used a title suggested by an RCA 501, and suspicion is strong that the machines themselves are guilty of burning midnight kilowatts to produce the acronyms that abound in the industry. The computer is even beginning to prove its worth as an abstracter.

Other literary jobs the computer has done include the production of a book of fares for the International Air Transport Association. The computer compiled and then printed out this 420-page book which gives shortest operating distances between 1,600 cities of the world. Now newspapers are beginning to use computers to do the work of typesetting. These excursions into the written language of human beings, plus its experience as a poet and in translation from language to language, have undoubtedly brought the computer a long way from its former provincialism.

As pointed out, computer work with human language generally is not accomplished without intermediate steps. For example, in one of the concordances mentioned, although the computer required only an hour to breeze through the work, a programmer had spent weeks putting it in the proper shape. What is needed is a converter which will do the work directly, and this is exactly what firms like Digitronics supply to the industry. This computer-age Berlitz school has produced converters for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith for use in billing its stock-market customers, Wear-Ever as an order-taking machine, _Reader’s Digest_ for mailing-list work, and Schering Corporation for rat-reaction studies in drug research, to mention a few.

The importance of such converters is obvious. Prior to their use it was necessary to type English manually into the correct code, a costly and time-consuming business. Converters are not cheap, of course, but they operate so rapidly that they pay for themselves in short order. Merrill Lynch’s machine cost $120,000, but paid back two-thirds of that amount in savings the first year. There is another important implication in converter operation. It can get computer language out of English—or Japanese, or even Swahili if the need arises. A more recent Digitronics’ converter handles information in English or Japanese.

If the computer has its language problems, man has them also, to the _n_th degree. There are about 3,000 tongues in use today; mercifully, scientific reports are published in only about 35 of these. Even so, at least half the treatises published in the world cannot be read by half the world’s scientists. Unfortunately, UNESCO estimates that while 50 per cent of Russian scientists read English, less than 1 per cent of United States scientists return the compliment! The ramifications of these facts we will take up a little later on; for now it will be sufficient to consider the language barrier not only to science but also to culture and the international exchange of good will that can lead to and preserve peace. Esperanto, Io, and other tongues have been tried as common languages. One recent comer to the scientific scene is called Interlingua and seems to have considerable merit. It is used in international medical congresses, with text totaling 300,000 words in the proceedings of one of these. But a truly universal language is, like prosperity, always just around the corner. Even the scientific community, recognizing the many benefits that would accrue, can no more adopt Interlingua or another than it can settle on the metric system of measurement. Our integration problems are not those of race, color, and creed only.

Before Sputnik our interest in foreign technical literature was not as keen as it has been since. One immediate result of the satellite launching by the Russians was amendment of U.S. Public Law 480 to permit money from the sale of American farm equipment abroad to be used for translation of foreign technical literature. We are vitally concerned with Russia, but have also arranged for thousands of pages of scientific literature from Poland, Yugoslavia, and Israel. Communist China is beginning to produce scientific reports too, and Japanese capability in such fields as electronics is evident in the fact that the revolutionary “tunnel diode” was invented by Esaki in Japan.

It is understandable that we should be concerned with the output of Russian literature, and much attention has been given to the Russian-English translator developed by IBM for the Air Force. It is estimated that the Russians publish a billion words a year, and that about one-third of this output is technical in nature. Conventional translating techniques, in addition to being tedious for the translators, are hopelessly slow, retrieving only about 80 million words a year. Thus we are falling behind twelve years each year! Outside of a moratorium on writing, the only solution is faster translation.

The Air Force translator was a phenomenal achievement. Based on a photoscopic memory—a glass disc 10 inches in diameter capable of storing 55,000 words of Russian-English dictionary in binary code—the system used a “one-to-one” method of translation. The result initially was a translation at the rate of about 40 words per minute of Russian into an often terribly scrambled and confusing English. The speed was limited not by the memory or the computer itself but by the input, which had to be prepared on tape by a typist. Subsequently a scanning system capable of 2,400 words a minute upped the speed considerably.

Impressive as the translator was, its impact was dulled after a short time when it was found that a second “translation” was required of the resulting pidgin English, particularly when the content was highly technical. As a result, work is being done on more sophisticated translation techniques. Making use of predictive analysis, and “lexical buffers” which store all the words in a sentence for syntactical analysis before final printout, scientists have improved the translation a great deal. In effect, the computer studies the structure of the sentence, determining whether modifiers belong with subject or object, and checking for the most probable grammatical form of each word as indicated by other words in the sentence.

The advanced nature of this method of translation requires the help of linguistics experts. Among these is Dr. Sydney Lamb of the University of California at Berkeley who is developing a computer program for analysis of the structure of any language. One early result of this study was the realization that not enough is actually known of language structure and that we must backtrack and build a foundation before proceeding with computer translation techniques. Dr. Lamb’s procedure is to feed English text into the computer and let it search for situations in which a certain word tends to be preceded or followed by other words or groups of words. The machine then tries to produce the grammatical structure, not necessarily correctly. The researcher must help the machine by giving it millions of words to analyze contextually.

What the computer is doing in hours is reproducing the evolution of language and grammar that not only took place over thousands of years, but is subject to emotion, faulty logic, and other inaccuracies as well. Also working on the translation problem are the National Bureau of Standards, the Army’s Office of Research and Development, and others. The Army expects to have a computer analysis in 1962 that will handle 95 per cent of the sentences likely to be encountered in translating Russian into English, and to examine foreign technical literature at least as far as the abstract stage.

Difficult as the task seems, workers in the field are optimistic and feel that it will be feasible to translate all languages, even the Oriental, which seem to present the greatest syntactical barriers. An indication of success is the announcement by Machine Translations Inc. of a new technique making possible contextual translation at the rate of 60,000 words an hour, a rate challenging the ability of even someone coached in speed-reading! The remaining problem, that of doing the actual reading and evaluation after translation, has been brought up. This considerable task too may be solved by the computer. The machines have already displayed a limited ability to perform the task of abstracting, thus eliminating at the outset much material not relevant to the task at hand. Another bonus the computer may give us is the ideal international and technical language for composing reports and papers in the first place. A logical question that comes up in the discussion of printed language translation is that of another kind of translation, from verbal input to print, or vice versa. And finally from verbal Russian to verbal English. The speed limitation here, of course, is human ability to accept a verbal input or to deliver an output. Within this framework, however, the computer is ready to demonstrate its great capability.

A recent article in _Scientific American_ asks in its first sentence if a computer can think. The answer to this old chestnut, the authors say, is certainly yes. They then proceed to show that having passed this test the computer must now learn to perceive, if it is to be considered a truly intelligent machine. A computer that can read for itself, rather than requiring human help, would seem to be perceptive and thus qualify as intelligent.

Even early computers such as adding machines printed out their answers. All the designers have to do is reverse this process so that printed human language is also the machine’s input. One of the first successful implementations of a printed input was the use of magnetic ink characters in the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) system developed by General Electric. This technique called for the printing of information on checks with special magnetic inks. Processed through high-speed “readers,” the ink characters cause electrical currents the computer can interpret and translate into binary digits.

Close on the heels of the magnetic ink readers came those that use the principle of optical scanning, analogous to the method man uses in reading. This breakthrough came in 1961, and was effected by several different firms, such as Farrington Electronics, National Cash Register, Philco, and others, including firms in Canada and England. We read a page of printed or written material with such ease that we do not realize the complex way our brains perform this miracle, and the optical scanner that “reads” for the computer requires a fantastically advanced technology.

As the material to be read comes into the field of the scanner, it is illuminated so that its image is distinct enough for the optical system to pick up and project onto a disc spinning at 10,000 revolutions per minute. In the disc are tiny slits which pass a certain amount of the reflected light onto a fixed plate containing more slits. Light which succeeds in getting through this second series of slits activates a photoelectric cell which converts the light into proportionate electrical impulses. Because the scanned material is moving linearly and the rotating disc is moving transversely to this motion, the character is scanned in two directions for recognition. Operating with great precision and speed, the scanner reads at the rate of 240 characters a second.

National Cash Register claims a potential reading rate for its scanner of 11,000 characters per second, a value not reached in practice only because of the difficulty of mechanically handling documents at this speed. Used in post-office mail sorting, billing, and other similar reading operations, optical scanners generally show a perfect score for accuracy. Badly printed characters are rejected, to be deciphered by a human supervisor.

It is the optical scanner that increased the speed of the Russian-English translating computer from 40 to 2,400 words per minute. In post-office work, the Farrington scanner sorts mail at better than 9,000 pieces an hour, rejecting all handwritten addresses. Since most mail—85 per cent, the Post Office Department estimates—is typed or printed, the electronic sorter relieves human sorters of most of their task. Mail is automatically routed to proper bins or chutes as fast as it is read.

The electronic readers have not been without their problems. A drug firm in England had so much difficulty with one that it returned it to the manufacturer. We have mentioned the one that was confused by Christmas seals it took for foreign postage stamps. And as yet it is difficult for most machines to read anything but printed material.

An attempt to develop a machine with a more general reading ability, one which recognizes not only material in which exact criteria are met, but even rough approximations, uses the _gestalt_ or all-at-once pattern principle. Using a dilating circular scanning method, the “line drawing pattern recognizer” may make it possible to read characters of varying sizes, handwritten material, and material not necessarily oriented in a certain direction. A developmental model recognizes geometric figures regardless of size or rotation and can count the number of objects in its scope. Such experimental work incidentally yields much information on just how the eye and brain perform the deceptively simply tasks of recognition. Once 1970 had been thought a target date for machine recognition of handwritten material, but researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories have already announced such a device that reads cursive human writing with an accuracy of 90 per cent.

The computer, a backward child, learned to write long before it could read and does so at rates incomprehensible to those of us who type at the blinding speed of 50 to 60 words a minute. A character-generator called VIDIAC comes close to keeping up with the brain of a high-speed digital computer and has a potential speed of 250,000 characters, or about 50,000 words, per _second_. It does this, incidentally, by means of good old binary, 1-0 technique. To add to its virtuosity, it has a repertoire of some 300 characters. Researchers elsewhere are working on the problems to be met in a machine for reading and printing out 1,000,000 characters per second!

None of us can talk or listen at much over 250 words a minute, even though we may convince ourselves we read several thousand words in that period of time. A simple test of ability to hear is to play a record or tape at double speed or faster. Our brains just won’t take it. For high-speed applications, then, verbalized input or output for computers is interesting in theory only. However, there are occasions when it would be nice to talk to the computer and have it talk back.

In the early, difficult days of computer development, say when Babbage was working on his analytical engine, the designer probably often spoke to his machine. He would have been stunned to hear a response, of course, but today such a thing is becoming commonplace. IBM has a computer called “Shoebox,” a term both descriptive of size and refreshing in that is not formed of initial capitals from an ad writer’s blurb. You can speak figures to Shoebox, tell it what you want done with them, and it gets busy. This is admittedly a baby computer, and it has a vocabulary of just 16 words. But it takes only 31 transistors to achieve that vocabulary, and jumping the number of transistors to a mere 2,000 would increase its word count to 1,000, which is the number required for Basic English.

The Russians are working in the field of speech recognition too, as are the Japanese. The latter are developing an ambitious machine which will not only accept voice instructions, but also answer in kind. To make a true speech synthetizer, the Japanese think they will need a computer about 5,000 times as fast as any present-day type, so for a while it would seem that we will struggle along with “canned” words appropriately selected from tape memory.

We have mentioned the use of such a tape voice in the computerized ground-controlled-approach landing system for aircraft, and the airline reservation system called Unicall in which a central computer answers a dialed request for space in less than three seconds—not with flashing lights or a printed message but in a loud clear voice. It must pain the computer to answer at the snail-like human speed of 150 words a minute, so it salves its conscience by handling 2,100 inputs without getting flustered.

The writer’s dream, a typewriter that has a microphone instead of keys and clacks away merrily while you talk into it, is a dream no longer. Scientists at Japan’s Kyoto University have developed a computer that does just this. An early experimental model could handle a hundred Japanese monosyllables, but once the breakthrough was made, the Japanese quickly pushed the design to the point where the “Sonotype” can handle any language. At the same time, Bell Telephone Laboratories works on the problem from the other end and has come up with a system for a typewriter that talks. Not far behind these exotic uses of digital computer techniques are such things as automatic translation of telephone or other conversations.

_Information Retrieval_

It has been estimated that some 445 trillion words are spoken in each 16-hour day by the world’s inhabitants, making ours a noisy planet indeed. To bear out the “noisy” connotation, someone else has reckoned that only about 1 per cent of the sounds we make are real information. The rest are extraneous, incidentally telling us the sex of the speaker, whether or not he has a cold, the state of his upper plate, and so on. It is perhaps a blessing that most of these trillions of words vanish almost as soon as they are spoken. The printed word, however, isn’t so transient; it not only hangs around, but also piles up as well. The pile is ever deeper, technical writings alone being enough to fill seven 24-volume encyclopedias each day, according to one source. As with our speech, perhaps only 1 per cent of this outpouring of print is of real importance, but this does not necessarily make what some have called the Information Explosion any less difficult to cope with.

The letters IR once stood for infra-red; but in the last year or so they have been appropriated by the words “information retrieval,” one of the biggest bugaboos on the scientific horizon. It amounts to saving ourselves from drowning in the fallout from typewriters all over the earth. There are those cool heads who decry the pushing of the panic button, professing to see no exponential increase in literature, but a steady 8 per cent or so each year. The button-pushers see it differently, and they can document a pretty strong case. The technical community is suffering an embarrassment of riches in the publications field.

While a doubling in the output of technical literature has taken the last twelve years or so, the next such increase is expected in half that time. Perhaps the strongest indication that IR is a big problem is the obvious fact that nobody really knows just how much has been, is being, or will be written. For instance, one authority claims technical material is being amassed at the rate of 2,000 pages a minute, which would result in far more than the seven sets of encyclopedias mentioned earlier. No one seems to know for sure how many technical journals there are in the world; it can be “pinpointed” somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. Selecting one set of figures at random, we learn that in 1960 alone 1,300,000 different technical articles were published in 60,000 journals. Of course there were also 60,000 books on technical subjects, plus many thousands of technical reports that did not make the formal journals, but still might contain the vital bit of information without which a breakthrough will be put off, or a war lost. Our research expenses in the United States ran about $13 billion in 1960, and the guess is they will more than double by 1970. An important part of research should be done in the library, of course, lest our scientist spend his life re-inventing the wheel, as the saying goes.

To back up this saying are specific examples. For instance, a scientific project costing $250,000 was completed a few days before an engineer came across practically the identical work in a report in the library. This was a Russian report incidentally, titled “The Application of Boolean Matrix Algebra to the Analysis and Synthesis of Relay Contact Networks.” In another, happier case, information retrieval saved Esso Research & Engineering Co. a month of work and many thousands of dollars when an alert—or lucky—literature searcher came across a Swedish scientist’s monograph detailing Esso’s proposed exploration. Another literature search obviated tests of more than a hundred chemical compounds. Unfortunately not all researchers do or can search the literature in all cases. There is even a tongue-in-cheek law which governs this phenomenon—“Mooer’s” Law states, “An information system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.”

As a result, it has been said that if a research project costs less than $100,000 it is cheaper to go ahead with it than to conduct a rigorous search of the literature. Tongue in cheek or not, this state of affairs points up the need for a usable information retrieval system. _Fortune_ magazine reports that 10 per cent of research and development expense could be saved by such a system, and 10 per cent in 1960, remember, would have amounted to $1.3 billion. Thus the prediction that IR will be a $100 million business in 1965 does not seem out of line.

The Center for Documentation at Western Reserve University spends about $6-1/2 simply in acquiring and storing a single article in its files. In 1958 it could search only thirty abstracts of these articles in an hour and realized that more speed was vital if the Center was to be of value. As a result, a GE 225 computer IR system was substituted. Now researchers go through the entire store of literature—about 50,000 documents in 1960—in thirty-five minutes, answering up to fifty questions for “customers.”

_International Business Machines Corp._

The document file of this WALNUT information retrieval system contains
the equivalent of 3,000 books. A punched-card inquiry system locates
the desired filmstrip for viewing or photographic reproduction.
]

_International Business Machines Corp._

This image converter of the WALNUT system optically reduces and
transfers microfilm to filmstrips for storage. Each strip contains
99 document images. As a document image is transferred from
microfilm to filmstrip, the image converter simultaneously assigns
image file addresses and punches these addresses into punched cards
controlling the conversion process.
]

The key to information retrieval lies in efficient abstracting. It has been customary to let people do this task in the past because there was no other way of getting it done. Unfortunately, man does not do a completely objective job of either preparing or using the abstract, and the result is a two-ended guessing game that wastes time and loses facts in the process. A machine abstracting system, devised by H. Peter Luhn of IBM, picks the words that appear most often and uses them as keys to reduce articles to usable, concise abstracts. A satisfactory solution seems near and will be a big step toward a completely computerized IR system.

For several years there has been a running battle between the computer IR enthusiast and the die-hard “librarian” type who claims that information retrieval is not amenable to anything but the human touch. It is true that adapting the computer to the task of information retrieval did not prove as simple as was hoped. But detractors are in much the same fix as the man with a shovel trying to build a dike against an angry rising sea, who scoffs at the scoop-shovel operator having trouble starting his engine. The wise thing to do is drop the shovel and help the machine. There will be a marriage of both types of retrieval, but Verner Clapp, president of the Washington, D.C., Council on Library Resources, stated at an IR symposium that computers offer the best chance of keeping up with the flood of information.

One sophisticated approach to IR uses symbolic logic, the forte of the digital computer. In a typical _reductio ad logic_, the following request for information:

An article in English concerning aircraft or spacecraft, written neither before 1937 or after 1957; should deal with laboratory tests leading to conclusions on an adhesive used to bond metal to rubber or plastic; the adhesive must not become brittle with age, must not absorb plasticizer from the rubber adherent, and must have a peel-strength of 20 lbs/in; it must have at least one of these properties—no appreciable solution in fuel and no absorption of solvent.

becomes the logical statement:

KKaVbcPdeCfg, and KAhiKKKNjNklSmn.

Armed with this symbolic abbreviation, the computer can dig quickly into its memory file and come up with the sought-for article or articles.

It has been suggested that the abstracting technique be applied at the opposite end of the cycle with a vengeance amounting to birth control of new articles. A Lockheed Electronics engineer proposes a technical library that not only accepts new material, but also rejects any that is _not_ new. Here, of course, we may be skirting danger of the type risked by human birth control exponents—that of unwittingly depriving the world of a president, or a powerful scientific finding. Perhaps the screening, the function of “garbage disposal,” as one blunt worker puts it, should be left as an after-the-fact measure.

Despite early setbacks, the computer is making progress in the job of information retrieval. Figures of a 300 per cent improvement in efficiency in this new application are cited over the last several years. Operation HAYSTAQ, a Patent Office project in the chemical patent section accounting for one-fifth of all patents, showed a 50 per cent improvement in search speed and 100 per cent in accuracy as a result of using automated methods. Desk-size computer systems with solid-state circuits are being offered for information retrieval.

The number of scientific information centers in this country, starting with one in 1830, reached 59 in 1940 and now stands at 144. Significantly, of 2,000 scientists and engineers working at these centers, 381 are computer people.

Some representative information retrieval applications making good use of computer techniques are the selection of the seven astronauts for the Mercury Project from thousands of jet pilots, Procter & Gamble’s Technical Information Service, demonstration of an electronic law library to the American Bar Association, and Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation’s Central Research Laboratory. The National Science Foundation, the National Bureau of Standards, and the U.S. Patent Office are among the government agencies in addition to the military services that are interested in electronic information retrieval.

_Summary_

The impact of the computer on education, language and communication, and the handling of information is obviously already strongly felt. These inroads will be increased, and progress hastened in the years ahead of us. Perhaps of the greatest importance is the assigning to the machine functions closer to the roots of all these things. Rather than simply read or translate language, for example, the computer seems destined to improve on it. The same applies to the process of teaching and to the storage and retrieval of data. The electronic computer has shown that it is not a passive piece of equipment, but active and dynamic in nature. It will soon be as much a part of the classroom and library as books; one day it may take the place of books themselves.

Lichty, © _Field Enterprises, Inc._

“How come they spend over a million on our new school, Miss Finch, and
then forget to put in computer machines?”
]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

“_’Tis one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past._”

—Montaigne

11: The Road Ahead

In Book One of _Les Miserables_, Cosette says, “Would you realize what Revolution is, call it Progress; and would you realize what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.” Victor Hugo’s definitions apply well to what has been termed by some the computer revolution and by others simply the natural evolution of species. The computer has a past and a present, differentiated mainly by the slope of the line plotting progress against time. Its future, which blurs somewhat with the present, will obviously be characterized by a line approaching the vertical.

The intelligent machine has been postulated for years, first by the scientist, then by the science-fiction writer, and now again by the scientist. Norbert Wiener of cybernetics fame, Ashby and his homeostat, Grey Walter and his mechanical turtles, A. M. Turing, John von Neumann, and others, have recently been joined by men like Ramo, Samuel, Newell, _et al._, who, if not actually beating the drums for machine intelligence, do more than admit to the possibility. For each such pro there are cons, of course, from sincere, intelligent authorities who in effect holler “Get a horse!” at those who say the computer is coming.

The Royal Society in England met its stiffest opposition from otherwise intelligent people who deplored naturalism in any form. Perhaps such detractors are a necessary goad, a part of progress. At any rate, science survived the Nicholas Gimcrack jibes of the Popes and Addisons and Swifts. Darwin was more right than Butler, though the latter probably made more money from his work. Today, we find a parallel situation in that there are those who refuse to accept the computer as an intelligent machine, though it is interesting to watch these objectors regroup and draw another line the machine dare not go past.

The writers of science and pseudo-science have often been accused of fantasy and blue-sky dreams. A case in point in the electronics field is the so-called “journalistor” or marvelous successor to the transistor. Such riding off in all directions with each new laboratory experiment may be justified in that it prods the scientist who must keep up with the press and his advertising department! This theory apparently works, and now it seems that the most startling and fantastic stories come not from writers, but from the scientists themselves.

In 1960 the Western Joint Computer Conference was held in San Francisco, and one session was devoted to the fanciful design and use of a computer with the problem-solving capability of an intelligent man and the speed and capacity of a high-speed data-processor. It was proposed to use “tunnel-effect tetrodes” with a switching time of one ten-billionth of a second as the logic and storage elements. These would be fabricated of thin-film materials by electron beam micromachining, and 100 billion of them could be packed into a cubic inch volume. With these tiny components and new circuit modes a supercomputer could be built, stored with information, and programmed to solve what one of the participants called the most difficult problem the human being faces today—that of bargaining.

This computer has not yet been built; it won’t be for some time. But design and fabrication are moving in that direction on a number of fronts. One of these fronts is that of hardware, the components used in building up the computer circuitry. In a decade we moved from vacuum tubes to transistors to thin-film devices. Examples of shrinkage on a gross scale are shown in the use of a single ferrite core to replace some twenty conventional (relatively speaking!) components.

Memory circuits once were mechanical relays or tube circuits. Briefly they were transistorized, and then ferrite cores. Magnetic thin-film circuits have now been developed, making random-access storage almost as compact as the sequential tape reel. As circuits grow smaller the major problem is manipulating them, or even seeing them, and a sneeze can be disastrous in today’s electronics plant.

One early journalistor was the molecular circuit. Many scientists and engineers working in the field scoffed at or derided such a visionary scheme. But the industry has indeed progressed into the integrated-circuit technology—a sort of halfway point—and is now on the fringe of actual functional block techniques in which the individual components are not discernible. Electronic switching and other action at the molecular level is close to reality, and hardheaded scientists now speak calmly of using a homogeneous block of material as a memory, scanning its three dimensions with the speed of light to locate any one or more of billions of bits of data in a few inches of volume.

Writing on the head of a pin was a prophetic bit of showmanship, and pinhead-size computers will not necessarily have pinhead mentalities. This progress toward a seemingly hopeless goal takes on an inexorable quality when the writings of von Neumann are compared with the state of the art today. Starting out much faster but much larger than similar elements of the brain, computer components have been made even faster while simultaneously shrinking dramatically toward the dimensions necessary to produce quantitative equivalence. It happens that these goals work out well together, the one helping the other. Circuitry is now at the point where speed is ultimately dependent on that limiter of all physical activity, the speed of light, or of electrons through a conductor. Only by putting elements closer together can speed be increased; thus one quality is not achieved at the sacrifice of the other.

_International Business Machines Corp._

This experimental “memory plane” consists of 135 cryotron devices
built up in a 19-layer “sandwich.” Produced automatically, it is an
example of continued shrinking of computer elements.
]

As an example of the progress being made toward speeding up computers, speakers at the recent Winter General Meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers described a coming generation of “gigacycle” computers now on the drawing boards. Present electronic machines operate at speeds in the megacycle range, with 50 million cycles per second representing the most advanced state of the art. Giga means billion; thus the new round of computers will be some thousand times as fast as those now operating.

Among the firms who plan such ultraspeed computers are RCA, IBM, and Sperry Rand Corporation. To achieve such a great increase in speed requires faster electronic switches. Transistors have been improved, and more exotic devices such as tunnel diodes, thin-film cryotrons, magnetic thin-films, parametrons, and traveling-wave tubes are now coming into use. Much of the development work is being supported by the U.S. Bureau of Ships. Operational gigacycle computers are expected within two years!

Not just the brickmaker, but the architect too has been busy in the job of optimizing the computer. The science of bionics and the study of symbolic logic lead to better ways of doing things. The computer itself comes up with improvements for its next generation, making one part do the work of five, and eliminating the need for whole sections of circuitry. Most computers have a fixed “clock”; that is, they operate at a certain cyclic rate. Now appearing on the scene are “asynchronous” computers which don’t stand around waiting when one job is done, as their predecessors did.

One advanced notion is the “growing” of complex electronic circuitry, in which a completed amplifier, or array of amplifiers, is pulled from the crystal furnace much the way material for transistors is now grown. Pooh-poohed at first as ridiculous, the notion has been tried experimentally. Since a computer is basically a multiplicity of simple units, the idea is not far off at that. It is conceivable that crystal structure can be exploited to produce millions of molecules of the proper material properly aligned for the desired electronic action.

With this shrinking come the benefits of small size, low power consumption, low cost, and perhaps lower maintenance. The computer will be cheap enough for applications not now economically feasible. As this happens, what will the computer do for us tomorrow?

A figure of 7 per cent is estimated for the amount of paperwork the computer has taken over in the business world. Computer men are eyeing a market some five times that amount. It does not take a vivid imagination to decide that such a percentage is perhaps conservative in the extreme. Computer sales themselves promise to show a fourfold increase in the five-year period from 1960 to 1965, and in the past predictions have been exceeded many times.

As population grows and business expands in physical size and complexity, it is obvious that the computer and its data-processing ability will be called upon more and more. There is another factor, that of the internationalizing of business. Despite temporary setbacks of war, protective tariffs, insular tendencies, and the like, in the long run we will live in one integrated world shrunk by data links that can get information from here to there and back again so fast it will be like conversing with someone across the room. Already planners are talking worldwide computerized systems.

As a mathematical whiz, the computer will relieve us of our money worries. Coupled with the credit card, perhaps issued to us at birth, a central computer will permit us to make purchases anywhere in the world and to credit our account with wages and other income. If we try to overdraw, it may even flash a warning light as fast as we put the card in the slot! This project interests General Dynamics researchers.

Of more importance than merely doing bookkeeping is the impact the computer will have on the planning and running of businesses. Although it is found in surveys that every person thinks computer application reaches to the level just below his in the management structure, pure logic should ultimately win out over man’s emotional frailties at all levels. Operations research, implemented by the computer, will make for more efficient businesses. Decisions will increasingly be made not by vice-presidents but by digital computers. At first we will have to gather the necessary information for these electronic oracles, but in time they will take over this function themselves.

Business is tied closely to education, and we have had a hint of the place the computer will make for itself in education. The effect on our motivation to learn of the little need for much learning will be interesting. But then, is modern man a weaker being because he kills a tiger with a high-powered rifle instead of club or bare hands—or has no need to kill the tiger in the first place?

After having proved itself as a patent searcher, the computer is sure to excel as inventor. It will invade the artistic field; computers have already produced pleasing patterns of light. Music has felt the effect of the computer; the trend will continue. Some day not far off the hi-fi enthusiast will turn on his set and hear original compositions one after the other, turned out by the computer in as regular or random form as the hearer chooses to set the controls. Each composition will bring the thrill of a new, fresh experience, unless we choose to go back in the computer’s memory for the old music.

The computer will do far more in the home than dream up random music for listening pleasure. The recorded telephone answerer will give way to one that can speak for us, making appointments and so on, and remembering to bring us up to date when we get home. A small computer to plug in the wall may do other things like selecting menus and making food purchases for next week, planning our vacations, and helping the youngsters with their homework. It is even suggested that the computer may provide us with child-guidance help, plus psychological counsel for ourselves and medical diagnoses for the entire family. The entire house might be computerized, able to run itself without human help—even after people are gone, as in the grimly prophetic story by Ray Bradbury in which a neat self-controlled home is shown as the curtains part in the morning. A mechanical sweeper runs about gathering up dust, the air conditioning, lighting, and entertainment are automatic, all oblivious to the fact that one side of the house is blackened from the blast of a bomb.

Perhaps guarding against that eventuality is the most important job the computer can do. Applications of computing power to government have been given; and hints made of the sure path from simple tasks like the census and income tax, Peace Corps work, and so on to decision-making for the president. Just as logic is put to work in optimizing business, it can be used to plan and run a taut ship of state. At first such an electronic cabinet member will be given all available information, which it will evaluate so as to be ready to make suggestions on policy or emergency action. There is more reason for it going beyond this status to become an active agent, than there is against. Government has already become so complex that perhaps a human brain, or a collection of them, cannot be depended on to make the best possible decision. As communications and transportation are speeded up, the problem is compounded. Where once a commander-in-chief could weigh the situation for days before he had to commit himself and his country to a final choice, he may now be called upon to make such a far-reaching decision in minutes—perhaps minutes from the time he is awakened from a sound sleep. The strongest opposition to this delegation of power is man’s own vanity. No machine can govern, even if it can think, the politician exclaims. The soldier once felt the same way; but operations research has given him more confidence in the machine, and SAGE and NORAD prove to him that survival depends on the speed and accuracy of the electronic computer.

Incurable romanticism is found even among our scientific community. The National Bureau of Standards describes a computer called ADAM, for Absolutely Divine Automatic Machine. But the scientists also know that ADAM, or man, needs help. Rather than consider the machine a tool, or even an extension of man’s mind, some are now concerned with a kind of marriage of man and machine in which each plays a significant part. Dr. Simon Ramo, executive vice president of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc., has termed this mating of the minds “intellectronics.” The key to this combination of man’s intellect and that of electronics is closer rapport between the team members.

_Department of Defense_

Computer use in defense is typified in this BIRDIE system of the
United States Army.
]

The man-machine concept has grown into a science called, for the present at least, “synnoetics,” a coinage from the Greek words _syn_ and _noe_ meaning “perceive” and “together.” This science is defined as the treating of the properties of composite systems, consisting of configurations of persons, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata, whose main attribute is that their ability to invent, to create, and to reason—their mental power—is greater than the mental power of their components.

We get a not-too-fanciful look into the future in a paper by Dr. Louis Fein presented in the summer 1961 issue of _American Scientist_, titled “Computer-related Sciences (Synnoetics) at a University in 1975.” Dr. Fein is an authority on computers, as builder of RAYDAC in 1952, and as founder and president of the Computer Control Company. The paper ostensibly is being given to alumni some years hence by the university president. Dr. Fein tells us that students in the Department of Synnoetics study the formal languages used in communication between the elements of a synnoetic system, operations research, game theory, information storage, organization and retrieval, and automatic programming. One important study is that of error, called Hamartiology, from the Greek word meaning “to miss the mark.”

The speaker tells us that this field was variously called cybernetics, information science, and finally computer-related science before being formally changed to the present synnoetics. A list of the courses available to undergraduates includes:

Von Neumann Machines and Turing Machines

Elements of Automatic Programming

Theory, Design, and Construction of Compilers

Algorithms: Theory, Design, and Applications

Foundations of the Science of Models

The Theory, Design, and Application of Non-Numeric Models

Heuristics

Self-Programming Computers

Advice Giving—Man to Machine and Machine to Man

Simulation: Principles and Techniques

Pattern Recognition and Learning by Automata

The Grammar, Syntax, and Use of Formal Languages for Communication
Between Machine and Machine and Between Man and Man

Man-Automaton Systems: Their Organization, Use, and Control

Problem-Solving: an Analysis of the Relationship Between the
Problem-Solver, the Problem, and the Means for Solution

Measurements of the Fundamental Characteristics of the Elements of
Synnoetic Systems

Of course, synnoetics spills over into the other schools, as shown in the following typical courses taught:

Botany Department
Machine-Guided Taxonomy in Botany

Business School
Synnoetic “Business Executives”

Engineering School
Theory of Error and Equipment Reliability
Design of Analog and Digital Computers

Humanities Department
Theory of Creative Processes in the Fine Arts

Law School
Patent and Precedence Searches with Computers
The Effect of Automata on the Legislative and Judicial Process

Mathematics Department
The Theory of Graphs and the Organization of Automata

Medical School
Computer-Aided Medical Diagnosis and Prescription for Treatment

Philosophy
The Relationships between Models and the Phenomena That Are Modeled

Psychology Department
Studies in Intuition and Intellect of Synnoetic Systems
Simulation in the Behavioral Sciences

Sociology Department
Synnoetics in Modern Society

The speaker proudly refers to the achievement of the faculty mediator and a computer in settling the “famous” strike of 1970.

He simply got both sides first to agree that each would benefit by concentrating attention—not on arguing and finally settling the issues one at a time—but on arguing and finally settling on a program for an automaton. This program would evaluate the thousands of alternative settlements and would recommend a small class of settlements each of which was nearly optimum for both sides. The automaton took only 30 minutes to produce the new contract last year. It would have taken one year to do this manually, and even then it would have been done less exhaustively. Agreeing on the program took one week. Of course, you have already heard that in many areas where people are bargaining or trying to make optimum decisions such as in the World Nations Organization, in the World Court, and in local, federal, and world legislative bodies, there is now serious consideration being given to convincing opposing factions to try to agree on a program and having once agreed on it, the contract or legislation or judgment or decision produced with the program would be accepted as optimum for both sides. Automata may also be provided to judges and juries to advise them of the effects of such factors as weight of evidence on verdicts in civil cases.